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Photo courtesy of Miramax Films
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Ashley Judd, left, and Selma Hayek play Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo in Julie Taymor's "Frida."
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By Mark Betancourt
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday November 21, 2002
Frida Kahlo's art makes its observer feel wounded. Her violent, carnal strokes mar the delicate senses we expect to be only gently caressed in places like art galleries. It is instinctual to turn away from things like this, things that expose human frailness. But Kahlo not only refused to turn away from her mortality, she painted it ÷ and in a joyful foreign language of color no less.
I know this because Julie Taymor knows this. She directed "Frida," her second film (after "Titus," and the phenomenal Broadway production of "The Lion King"), which tells Frida Kahlo's story.
The film shows how Frida (Selma Hayek) met Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), the renowned painter she would eventually marry, and became a painter herself. For the most part what follows is a love story, although Frida's romance with Rivera is entwined in everything else in her life, much like her painting.
Most of the movie is shot in Frida's native Mexico, and Taymor makes sure to portray Frida's homeland in a way that reflects the adoration with which she painted it.
The film is as artistically creative as its subject. It is full of passionate color and dramatic real light, both laden with the gravity of honest day-to-dayness. But one of the film's most beautiful and ingenious tricks is a motif that, from its very first usage, fits Frida Kahlo perfectly.
Early on in the movie, when Frida is still a schoolgirl (Selma Hayek is one of the few actresses who can play herself as a schoolgirl and as an adult in the same movie), she is in a trolley accident. The accident itself is gorgeous to watch, since Taymor slows it down and sprinkles gold all over it (you'll see).
But then a little Mexican marionette show comes on. Claymation skeleton doctors lick their bony fingers and scurry back and forth muttering medical terminology, electricity crackling somewhere in the darkness beyond their glowing, black-lit stage. This is what the hospital feels like to Frida after her accident.
This is very cool.
Taymor does this a few more times, like a writer lapsing into poetic trance when the spirit is sufficiently moving. Later, on tour with Diego in New York, Frida looks out a window and sees a burning dress, then the dress changes into cardboard and the background flattens ÷ then the movie goes on. At times, Frida will walk into a room and sit down, there will be a nearly imperceptible change, and suddenly we're looking at one of her many self-portraits.
It's as if we can see how Frida's painter mind works, how her heart makes masterpieces out of her life's pain, dealt not only from her crippling accident but from her love of the woman-wild Diego.
This film is exciting. Not because stuff blows up or because you get to see Hayek naked a lot ÷ which you do ÷ but because it makes you excited about life.
Taymor once said that art must bring out the darkness within us as well as the joy. Somehow out of that comes an understanding that elevates us beyond our daily grind. Films like this make you love life, not only because they make it look beautiful, but because they make it look sacred.
